Sociocultural Perspectives

The problem of gun violence in the US is deeply complex and especially serious among developed nations in the world. Despite being declared as a major public health issue in 1989 by the American Medical Association Council on Scientific Affairs, gun violence has received remarkably little attention from researchers, due to political controversy and lack…

As medicine becomes increasingly specialized, it is more important than ever to train medical students to not only be competent but caring physicians. Nevertheless, many medical ethics courses continue to tend towards presenting impersonal, austere case studies that prioritize taking action and immediate decision making over seeing the patient as first and foremost, a person…

People have wondered what it would be like to face the unimaginable: hearing a physician read off a hopeless list of test results, being forced to make an inconceivable decision regarding intubation and life support, while questioning what their beloved friend or family member would have wanted. Health providers often avoid and families often put…

With what seems to be an endless midterm season, I often find myself dragging my feet to Olin library, the only place I’ll ever get my work done. As soon as I settle into my chair, I put in my earphones and turn on my Spotify playlist. Looking around my surroundings, I see that my…

Seventeen dead in Parkland. Twenty-six dead in Sutherland. Forty-nine dead in Orlando. Twenty-seven dead at Sandy Hook. Fifty-eight dead in Las Vegas. As death tolls continue to climb and the frequency of mass shootings increase, gun violence has become one of the leading causes of premature death, killing more than 30,000 people and causing nearly…

There is roughly a gallon of blood sloshing around in your veins right now. If you were to lose around 40% of it, the lack of oxygen being carried to organs and strain on your heart to keep blood pressure high would quickly result in death. This need for donated blood is common in car…

Lack of sanitary pad usage has become a public health issue for women in India. Only 12% of menstruating women in India use sanitary pads when on their period [5]. The other 88 percent of women resort to stuffing their undergarments with various unhygienic objects such as unsanitized cloth, ashes, husk sand, and others [5]….

The day-to-day grind of saving the world is not glamorous. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a sizeable portion of the work involves testing samples from receiving centers, crunching data and finding out if a grocery store’s brussel sprouts or chicken salad has caused the latest salmonella outbreak. Such mundane work in…

“Bill Nye Saves the World” is a new show starring Bill Nye, a well-known and popular member of the science education community. The series description claims to “look at topics from a scientific point of view, refuting myths and claims that rebuke science”. Since Bill Nye is influential, this article seeks to investigate Bill Nye’s…

Issues of sexual assault and harassment have been at the forefront of public attention. Numerous reports of sexual assault have been vocalized against high profile individuals such as film producer Harvey Weinstein and actor Ben Affleck. Such accusations inspired campaigns such as the #MeToo hashtag, which encourages survivors of sexual assault to share their stories…